Return of the Moldy Slides

Event is free, but please RSVP at
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/doug-harvey-return-of-the-moldy-slides-tickets-45819255627 
(Campus parking is $2)

The Photographic Arts Council Los Angeles presents 

"Doug Harvey - Return of the Moldy Slides"

Tuesday May 15, 8 PM - 10 PM
Los Angeles Valley College, Art 103
5800 Fulton Ave, Valley Glen, Los Angeles 91401

After a five-year hiatus, Doug Harvey returns to his archive of found moldy slides to curate his first new presentation since Rhizomatic Transmissions, which screened at The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Hammer Museum, UCLA, Echo Park Film Center, and various other Los Angeles and West Coast venues.

 Compiled from a collection of several thousand 35 mm photographic transparencies found in the detritus excavated from a local hoarder's house during an apparent intervention, the slides had been subjected to flooding and grown various types and degrees of fungal layers, altering the pictorial content of the emulsion -- sometimes slightly, sometimes transforming the image into a total abstraction.

Harvey describes the resulting (washed and stabilized) artifacts as " a stochastically linked collaboration between the original vacation photographer, crazy hoarder dude, the mold, and me – plus the found and improvised soundtrack elements, and finally the audience.”

Los Angeles critic Shana Nys Dambrot describes the found moldy slides as "flat-out gorgeous... and just as fascinating on a conceptual/semantic level, introducing issues of authorship, truth, transcendence, intention, control, chaos, narrative, meaning, and analog physicality into a larger conversation about photography in the digital era."

Return of the Moldy Slides will consist of a new selection of the actual original slides using vintage Kodak carousel projectors, and will be accompanied by a live performance of improvised music by The Friendliness Happening.

F (for Whatever) Live Moldy Slide soundtrack FRIDAY!

For their first live appearance since the Mike Kelley tribute concert at the Box in 2012, F (formerly Faüxmish and F for Ache) will perform live, in a free, improvised soundtrack to a previously unscreened program of found moldy slides presented by Jancar Gallery in conjunction with their current exhibit of Doug Harvey's Found Moldy Slides. Special guest saw solo by Christian Cummings.

F is a Los Angeles art-rock supergroup whose motto is "Simplicity Through Noise," and who have developed a practice rooted in improvisational ensemble playing using electric guitars and vintage synthesizers, in various combinations of three or four.  F has released one limited edition full-length vinyl/CD recording and is currently compiling its follow-up, F2. F are (l to r): Doug Harvey, Marnie Weber, Dani el Hawkins,  and Dani Tull (who will unfortunately not be performing on this occasion).

"F for Found Moldy Slides" Friday April 4th, 8 PM

Jancar Gallery, 961 Chung King Road, Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Program should run approximately 30 minutes.

Last week of Online Moldy Slide Exhibit!

Another Year in LA Presents:

Doug Harvey

Moldy Slides: Romantic Landscapes Rearranged

July 1 - August 31, 2021

Roman Placenta Disc, 2021

Dedicated to Stuart Spence and Diana Zlotnick

Doug Harvey's Moldy Slides project began with a chance discovery of a cache of discarded amateur photographic transparencies dating to the 1970s in the piles of material being disposed of during an apparent hoarder intervention. The slides had been subjected to flooding and grown various types and degrees of fungal layers, altering the pictorial content of the emulsion -- sometimes slightly, sometimes transforming the image into a total abstraction. Harvey describes the resulting (washed and stabilized) artifacts as " a stochastically linked collaboration between the original vacation photographer, crazy hoarder dude, the mold, and me – plus the found and improvised soundtrack elements, and finally the audience."

The once personal narrative contained in the travel photographs had been altered, obscured and even destroyed by the natural processes of decay and the ravages of time in a manner analogous to the effects of memory loss. Harvey performs an act of détournement by transforming this pile of refuse back into a commentary on cultural amnesia and decay by using the apparatus originally intended for nostalgia.

In its performance iteration Harvey projects a curated sequence of 150 images in a slideshow accompanied by live improvisational noise music, taking on what art critic Shana Nys Dambrot called "a conceptual/semantic level, introducing issues of authorship, truth, transcendence, intention, control, chaos, narrative, meaning, and analog physicality" in a "larger conversation about photography in the digital era."

The original live Moldy Slide Show was projected at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the Hammer Museum, UCLA, The Echo Park Film Center, and several other West Coast venues. A selection from that group were reproduced and exhibited in London through the Strange Attractor Journal, where they were hailed by cultural commentator Adam Harper (and subsequently by WIRE Magazine) as a visual counterpart to the "hauntological" music of The Caretaker, William Basinski, Indignant Senility, and others -- invoking the philosophical spirits of Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher.

Just prior to COVID, Harvey was engaged in a revival of the project, with several performances of a live show with a new selection of moldy slides and a solo exhibit at the California Museum of Photography, consisting of an edition made with an an anachronistic printing techniques in collaboration with The ƒ/Ø Project. Romantic Landscapes Rearranged picks up where The Erinnerungen an Verlassene Zukünfte Suite left off, wandering the ruins, forests and moors in a

F for Found Moldy Slides Performance Pix

Here are a bunch of images from the F performance at my solo show of Found moldy Slides at Jancar Gallery, on Friday April 4, 2014. F was DougH, Marnie Weber (playing theremin with a hoe in a backwards crone mask!) and Daniel Hawkins, with a projection of 80 previously unseen moldy slides (projector operated by Tom Jancar). Thanks to everyone who came out -- I'll try and get an audio recording pieced together in the next while.

Weird Hours and Moldy Slides

My solo retrospective, Untidy: The Worlds of Doug Harvey, closes next Wednesday, Nov 26th, just in time for Thanksgiving! However, many who have sought to amplify their imminent feelings of gratitude with an actual physical encounter with my parallel oeuvres have been frustrated by their assumption that the LAVC gallery operates on a typical gallery schedule. It does not. For starters it is NOT open Saturdays. Or Fridays. And Monday through Thursday they have the unusual schedule of being open between 11 AM and 2 PM, then closing until 6 PM, then reopening until 9 PM. So that's Monday - Thursday 11-2 & 6 - 9.


In related news, we've finally managed to book the LAVC art history lecture room for a screening of moldy slides, examples of which are included above and below. I've been showing a selection of these around for a few years, but I recently began working on Rhizomatic Transmission - a completely new show, which was debuted at the Museum of Jurassic Technology with a live soundtrack by Mannlicher Carcano. I recorded the improvised soundtrack and borrowed the MJT's remarkable Bell & Howell Tandem-Matic slide projector, and now that we have the room booked we're good to go!

The slides were recovered about 5 years ago from a dumpster-bound pile outside the house of our local crazy hoarder dude who had apparently suffered an intervention of some sort, as bin after bin of moldering bric-a-brac kept finding its way to the curb over a period of months. I was able to resist the broken lamps and deflated soccer balls, but when several cardboard boxes filled with 35mm vacation slides (apparently originally acquired somewhere else - crazy hoarder dude wasn't actually in any of the pictures) I ceased to resist.

After discovering the remarkable visual properties of the disintegrating emulsion, I sorted the plain from the fungal, then washed and dried about 1000 mold-altered images, and began organizing them by relative fabulousness and pictorial intelligibility (notice the car in the lower right corner of the top image? My favorite.) The result was very satisfying - a stochastically linked collaboration between the original vacation photographer, crazy hoarder dude, the mold, and me - plus the found and improvised soundtrack elements.


Rhizomatic Transmission will be projected on Tuesday November 25th at 8 PM in Room 103 of the Art Building at Los Angeles Valley College, located near the corner of Fulton Ave and Oxnard Rd, at the NW corner of the LAVC campus. The gallery will be open between 6 and 9.

Found Moldy Slides at Jancar Saturday!

J A N C A R G A L L E R Y
961 CHUNG KING ROAD
LOS ANGELES, CA 90012
TEL 213 625-2522
Hours: Wednesday – Saturday 12 – 5 PM (and by appointment)
www.jancargallery.com

JANCAR GALLERY is pleased to announce an exhibition of photographs by DOUG HARVEY - "Found Moldy Slides"

March 15 - April 12, 2014
Opening reception for the artist: Saturday, March 15, from 6 - 9 PM

Live Slideshow with musical accompaniment by the Moldy Drum and Bugle Corps at 8

Transparent Hauntologies

I was just reminded of this very thoughtful and accurate rundown of the Found Moldy Slides as hauntological artifacts akin to the Disintegration Loops of Billy Basinski and the lo-fi pop gems of Ariel Pink. Be sure and click through to his other articles on art and music as examples of "the haunting of a historicised present by spectres that cannot be ‘ontologised’ away."

"One of the most exciting things about hauntology, I think, is that it’s possibly one of the first aesthetic movements in quite a while to see some very specific equivalence in technique between sonic and visual art. I’d been looking long and hard for a visual counterpart to the music of The Caretaker, William Basinski and lately Indignant Senility– I knew one definitely existed, it was just a matter of finding it – when I suddenly found a postcard of an image from one Doug Harvey yesterday.
The Caretaker, Basinski and Indignant Senility (call them the ‘playback hauntologists’) create new pieces of music from ancient tape and vinyl recordings that are treated or weathered down in various ways until they become an ironic, emotionally-laden dark ambient noise. Generally their work is not what you’d call collage – the recordings they use are chopped into long extracts, looped or even left to play in their entirety, but significantly they don’t combine samples (as The Focus Group does) or mix in more contemporary elements (as Boards of Canada and Mordant Music do). In this way the outlines of the original source object are faintly intact, but it’s heavily ‘decayed’ or ‘decaying’.
The rotted celluloid paintings of Peter Doig, which I described in my big ol’ treatise on and survey of hauntology, seemed a bit analogical to this process, but since they were paintings, the original image (even if based on a photograph as it usually was) was always ultimately contrived. To make the equivalence closer, the original source object would have to be an image that was recorded in a similar way as sound is recorded on tape or vinyl. Such a recorded image would of course be generated through photography.
The images in this post are slides found by Doug Harvey in the growing pile of waste kipple outside the Los Angeles home of a serial hoarder, following some kind of intervention or change of heart. Untouched for years, the slides had fallen prey to damp and mould, a process which dramatically transformed the colours and forms within them..."

Read the rest of Adam Harper's Out of the Mould, the New here.

Chinatown Autumn Moon Artmageddon

Tomorrow, after the no doubt spectacular debut of the rescheduled-back-to-Saturday-afternoon Mannlicher Carcano Radio Hour, I will be heading east to Chinatown for two separate but equally cool happenings during the citywide Artmageddon as well as the Autumn Moon Festival - the first being the opening of The Small Loop Show curated by China Adams for the Fellows of Contemporary Art.

 The Small Loop Show is a miniaturized recurrence of the acclaimed Loop Show at Beacon Arts last winter, and features sculpture, painting, video, and collage by Miyoshi Barosh, Christian Cummings, Amy Drezner, Mark Dutcher, myself, Anne Hieronymus, Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor, Robert Larson, John Luckett, Nuttaphol Ma, Stephen McCabe, Dane Picard, William Ransom, Don Suggs, Christine Wertheim, Alexis Zoto, and China Adams.

My contribution is a tiny new chapter from my ongoing experimental collage graphic novel The Cryogenic Angel, entitled A Wandering Menstrual Eye. Here are the first two verses - you'll have to come to the show to see how it turns out. The Small Loop Show opens in the FOCA Exhibition Space located at 970 N Broadway, Suite 208 (on the second floor of the dilapidated Mandarin Plaza) Saturday, September 29th, 2012 at 6pm and runs through November 24th 2012.

 Simultaneously, I will be presenting my legendary Moldy Slide Show for the first time in several years, as part of Translucent Travels: An Evening of Slide Show Travelogues at Automata on Chung King Road. The Moldy Slides were extracted, cleaned and painstakingly sorted from a cache of thousands found in one of many dumpster-loads of material purged from the home of a bona fide hoarder in Edendale after torrential rains sogged his hoard a few years back. One is also on view as a giant backlit transparency in the Illumination group show at The Prospectus at the PDC.

The slideshow is constantly evolving, but this iteration will include the classic soundtrack featuring Christian Cummings, possibly playing live musical saw. Other presenters include Ursula Brookbank, Moira MacDonald, Julianna (JP) Parr, and Sara Velas plus Don Suggs' Picture Machine on view in the gallery window. Don Wildman of the Travel Channel is the guest Master of Ceremonies, and attendees are invited to bring their own 35mm slides for projection. Everything happens Saturday, September 29, 2012 at 8 PM. Tickets are $10, seating is limited. See the Automata site for further details.

Fungus for the Whole Family

In conjunction with the show DARKNESS & LIGHT at Pasadena's Armory Northwest (in which I also have a sculpture) I'll be presenting my show of Moldy Slides with vintage hypnosis records and live musical saw accompaniement at 8 PM Saturday, January 20. This is a selection (140 from a couple of thousand) of moldy travel slides scavenged from the pile of debris outside the house of an Echo Park hoarder who must have got a court order to clean up.

965 North Fair Oaks Avenue, Pasadena

Darkness & Light
Opening reception, , 7-9 p.m.

Not in the show, but moldy as hell...

DOUG HARVEY - "Found Moldy Slides"

March 15 - April 12, 2014

J A N C A R G A L L E R Y

961 CHUNG KING ROAD
LOS ANGELES, CA 90012
TEL 213 625-2522
Hours: Wednesday – Saturday 12 – 5 PM (and by appointment)
www.jancargallery.com

Happy Birthday Art!

I'll have a post about my solo show opening and the upcoming moldy slides screening shortly, but first a heads-up concerning a rare Mannlicher Carcano radio broadcast hosted by Gogo Godot in Winnipeg on The University of Manitoba's CFUM-FM on Wednesday from 11 - 1 Pacific Time (1 -3 Winnipeg time) as part of the station's all day radio art celebration of "Art's birthday." Tune in. We'll give Art one to grow on! In the ear! Oh yeah, there was a record number of adjunct participants in the LA Mannlicher audio dungeon two weeks ago: Clockwise from Buddy Holy (in orange shirt); Purse Launch, Herr Schurdt, Cocoa Puph, Christ's Cumming II. Photographed by Really Happening.

Pretty Damn Cool

Carl Berg threw together the Illumination show for his "The Prospectus" space at the Pacific Design Center in a few days, and he didn't have time to assemble the elaborately rickety funhouse environment he had in mind for this collection of large-scale backlit transparencies, but it turned out pretty awesome nevertheless. I finally got to see one of my Moldy Slides in the large format I'd envisioned for them - this is Luray Caverns 1: Washington Column (2012)

The front gallery is taken up by a remarkable small group of photos taken by former Hog Farm anesthesiologist Andy Romanoff, documenting Nicholas Ray at the Chateau Marmont in 1973, working on his experimental collaborative film We Can't Go Home Again. Coincidentally, Lee Lynch caught a screening of the newly restored version of this while in Marseilles last winter for the Murder of Hi Good premiere, and it's been making the rounds in LA since.

Speaking of revisionist westerns, there was a fairly interesting experiment in that genre in Paul Young's adjacent video gallery Young Projects. American Night by the Berlin-based Julian Rosefeldt had several excellent postmodern punchlines and some hypnotic pastoral passages, but it's no Hi Good. Of course it didn't help that two idiot art chicks sat through 3/4 of it nattering at full volume about their stupid career ambitions. Haven't they heard of texting?!

 Of more interest was the walk-through video installation 1967 by Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib, which contained multiple references to Expo 67, a topic close to my heart. I wonder how many other viewers caught the looped sample from the Bobby Gimby's insidious centennial children's chorus novelty single Canada. Or the metastasizing geometrics of Habitat 67 (seen lower left, above)? Then I saw this in the parking lot:

The Pacific Design Center 

8687 Melrose Avenue (at San Vicente Boulevard) 

W. Hollywood, CA 90069 

NOTE: Open Tues-Fri ONLY! 

Andy Romanoff: Nicholas Ray at the Chateau Marmont and Illumination (also includes Petra Schilder, Johannes Spalt, Mazin Sami and Paul Silkowski) through November 2, 2012 

1967 up through Nov 1 

American Night through Oct 27

OPENING FRIDAY APR &: 2020 BLACK ABSTRACT PAINTINGS

Doug Harvey: 2020 BLACK ABSTRACT PAINTINGS

April 7 - April 30, 2023

AC Institute’s The Art "Museum" of the Tired, Poor, & Rejected

2825 Dewey Road Building 202, Suite 201, San Diego, 92106 (Liberty Station)

Gallery hours: Saturdays 12 - 4 PM

AC Institute’s The Art "Museum" of the Tired, Poor, & Rejected is mildly chuffed to announce the debut exhibition of Doug Harvey’s 2020 BLACK ABSTRACT PAINTINGS, an installation of a series of two thousand and twenty small acrylic-on cardstock works completed in the year 2020.

Sheep in Wolves' Clothing is a San Diego experimental music supergroup assembled specifically for this event, and consisting of
Nathan Hubbard - percussion, drums, synth
Mathew Raker - keyboards
Dylan Lee Brown - guitar, array, mbira
Sejal Janaswamy - drums, percussion
Sidney Merritt - clarinet, Qchord, theremin, guitar


Graphically compelling, the intricate black pareidolia-inducing forms and textures recall art historical precedents from Surrealist Automatism to Chinese shanshui hua landscapes, and are intended for intimate contemplation. Collectively installed as a wall-filling grid, their combination of chaotic visual signals and precise mathematical structure conjures additional associations, including Serialism and experimental graphic narrative.

While not explicitly referencing the Trump presidency, the ongoing social upheavals surrounding racial injustice or COVID, the artist states that “it sometimes seems that all you can do in response to the hyperarticulated absurdities of contemporary society is to punch open a portal into another world with a singular post-rational gesture. Or maybe two thousand and twenty of them.”

2020 BLACK ABSTRACT PAINTINGS is also one of Harvey’s “reservoir” painting installations, where individual units of the piece can be replaced without affecting the overall impact of the installation. Individual paintings are therefore available for immediate cash & carry purchase at the communistic price of $20, or the whole shebang for a more capitalistic $35,000.

Following the exhibition, AC Books will publish 2020 BLACK ABSTRACT PAINTINGS: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL, a 520 page volume containing reproductions of the entire image sequence presented as an experimental graphic narrative, in an edition of 100, with explanatory and interpretive texts.
Doug Harvey is an artist, curator and writer based in Los Angeles. Best known in the Art World for his 15 year tenure as Lead Art Critic for LA Weekly, other journalism, and extensive body of catalog essays, he has maintained parallel practices as an independent curator and multimedia artist while steadfastly resisting vertical integration into the Academy, Marketplace, or any other Art World institution.
Harvey's art work ranges across painting, collage, found objects, film and video, performance, installation, publications, and sound. He received his MFA in Painting from UCLA in 1994 and has exhibited extensively, including over a dozen solo shows at artist-run LA galleries including POST, High Energy Constructs, and Jancar Gallery.

His ongoing series related to a set of found moldy 35mm slides (projected, printed, and displayed online) has been exhibited internationally and at venues throughout LA including The Hammer Museum, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Jancar Gallery, LA Valley College Art Gallery, another year in LA, and the California Museum of Photography.

Reviewing his solo debut at POST Gallery, St. Sebastian Tom Sawyer Cathy Mishima Expo 67, LA Times critic David Pagel wrote "Harvey’s art makes the most outlandish conspiracy theorist look like a stodgy logician." Art in America critic Constance Mallinson said of his October 2010 solo painting show Unsustainable at Jancar Gallery “Harvey’s work reeks of rot and decay.” On the occasion of Untidy, Harvey’s mid-career survey at LA Valley College, LA Times’ Christopher Knight commented “the raging torrent of modern media-culture is his medium, and the paintings, collages, drawings and sculpture seem to regard it as a revealing cesspool of bleak but salvageable fun.”

Founded in 2004 by Holly Crawford, the AC Institute’s mission is to advance the understanding of the arts through investigation, research, and education. It is an art think-tank fostering experimentation and critical discussion through events, exhibitions, and publishing. It supports and develops projects that explore a performative exchange across visual, sonic, verbal, and experiential disciplines, encouraging critical writing that challenges conventional expectations of meaning and objectivity, as well as the boundaries between the rational and subjective. The AC Institute is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization. After almost two decades in Chelsea (NYC), they opened their West Coast facility The Art "Museum" of the Tired, Poor, & Rejected in San Diego in early 2023.

Their publishing wing AC Books fosters experimentation and critical discussion by publishing unique, design-forward, books on a variety of dynamic subject matters, particularly concerning contemporary art history, criticism, and art practice, including Doug Harvey’s 2013 ‘patacritical Interrogation Techniques Anthology Volume 3, a collection of pre-existing texts subjected to extreme stress to make them reveal their hidden meanings, reprints of key documents in ‘patacritical history, and original artifacts generated from new research.